Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I
joked the other day that I was so pleased that Arsenal lost the Champions
League final to Barcelona, I was going to order one of the those
new Macbooks – well I
actually did it in the end (there’s schadenfreude for you) and it arrived
yesterday, just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Hats off to Apple
actually; the original date I was given when I placed the order was June 5th,
the day before I go on holiday, then it got brought forward to next Tuesday, and
it actually got delivered last Friday. Considering it was one of the white ones
with extra RAM and a bigger hard disk, i.e. a "build to order", that’s not bad.

I’ve always harboured guilty desires towards getting a Mac, but could never
justify the 50%+ price premium that they charged up until recently. The new
Macbook range, however, comes in at around £1000 with 1GB of RAM and a 100GB
hard disk, and given that it’s pretty compact – a 13" widescreen display, much
smaller than my work Dell laptop – the price is pretty good now and compares
well with the ultra-compacy Vaios you see at the airport duty free shops. For
me, the attraction with Macs is OS X – an excellent UI on top of a Unix kernel -
which seemed to give me the best of both worlds; a familiar command line
environment not too dissimilar to Linux, with all the "fit and finish" of an
Apple product. The clincher though was the fact that it now runs on an x86 CPU -
a 2Ghz Core Duo to be exact – which means I can
dual-boot into Windows, or run
Linux (and therefore Oracle) on a VM.

So far it’s been an interesting transition. Up until now I’ve been using a
mix of Windows XP (for admin stuff) and Centos 4.2 (for Oracle, development work
etc) with Centos either being hosted in a VM or running native on my home PC.
Certainly going from XP to Centos is a lot easier than going from XP to OS X; in
OS X, there’s no Start Menu listing out all the programs you can access, instead
you either find them using the finder, or they register icons of themselves in
the dock at the bottom of the page.

Although the dock is "prettier", it does have a scalability
problem, as you can’t just add more and more icons to it. Also, the lack of a
right mouse button is a bit strange; I’m using an Apple Wireless Keyboard and
Mouse (not the Mighty Mouse) and everything seems to take twice as long to do -
first select an icon, then go up to the menu bar and select the action, as
opposed to just right mouse clicking. I’m sure I’ll find a faster way soon, but
it’s a bit strange first of all.

What is impressive though is the attention to detail, and the
visual style. Part of the decision to buy a Mac was down to seeing the reviews
of Vista that are coming out, with the Aero Glass effects looking

particularly gaudy and User Account Protection making the system
pretty much
unusable if you want to run in anything other that Administrator mode. In contrast, OS X was here now, had the same sort of features (and
better ones to boot) as Vista, and was also based on a solid Unix core. Now I’ve
had a play around with it, the quality is certainly unmistakable, and I’m
certainly impressed so far.

As a contrast, I also took the opportunity to get a new phone
last week. I used to have an
Orange SPV C600,
a Windows Mobile 5.0-based phone that I was considering binning as it obviously
wasn’t going to sync with my new Mac. What was good about the phone was that it
had a terrific 65K colour screen with a 240×320 screen, but it wouldn’t sync
with the Mac and I was due for a free upgrade. I had a look around and got a new
Sony Ericsson W810i, with a 2 megapixel camera, MP3 player and an FM radio, plus
of course it’ll sync with a Mac (and with Evolution on Linux as well). Anyway,
the phone arrived last week, and you know what – I’ve ended up sending it back
and keeping the C600. Although the Sony Ericsson works with the Mac, the screen
resolution, and software, was rubbish, and as I mainly use it for picking up
emails (on Mobile Outlook) and reading RSS feeds (using
NewsBreak) I was
better off sticking with what I’ve got. I’ll save my free upgrade for later,
when I can get hold of a compatible phone that’s actually useful for something
other than games.

The only sticking point now with the Mac is that I can’t use my
Vodafone 3G card with it, as there’s no PCMCIA slot in this new model. There are
a couple of workarounds – you can get USB to PCMCIA adapters, but they’re pricey
($200 or so) or

not all that practical for me to take on the train, so I’ll probably have to
stick with WiFi if I’m on the move. Also, now I’ve got the Mac, I’ll have to
think about what I’ll do with my PC; it’s a dual core Athlon x64 with 2GB of RAM
- if I don’t end up using it for Windows XP much more, I’ll convert it to a
full-time Linux server and use it as an Oracle development and testbed.

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